A “For Sale” sign on a piece of vacant land — a rarity these days in Kitsap County. Vacant, buildable land is commanding the highest prices in Kitsap’s history.

The lack of homes on the real estate market and the escalating prices are nearing a crisis, some people in the industry believe. It’s going to get worse, they say — and it’s all thanks to the Growth Management Act (GMA), which limits the number of available buildable lots.

“This county is in a crisis and by the time the people realize it, it may be too late,” says county Commissioner Jan Angel. “We’re so highly regulated, and with the lack of flexibility with the Growth Management Act, it’s driving up the cost of housing.”

When the GMA was adopted by the state in 1995, it focused on reducing sprawl and encouraging development in urban areas while providing affordable housing. But in some respects, it has accomplished the opposite.

“I don’t really believe the Growth Management Act works,” says Bill Palmer, a land-use consultant with W.M. Palmer Consultants and a former Kitsap County planning director. “It creates more problems than it was ever designed to solve. The intent is to force people to live where they don’t want to live. People don’t believe they should be forced to do things in America, where they believe they have the right to choice.”

Dick Brown, a developer with Kitsap Commercial Group, calls the GMA “the poor man’s enemy.”

“People at the bottom of the food chain are the ones who are hurt the most,” he says. “This is about the rich and the poor. The rich can live anywhere they want and the other people we’ve driven into the city.”

But driving the people into the city presents its own problems. Most growth in Kitsap County has been in the rural areas, and concentrating 76 percent of growth in the urban areas means cities have to accommodate the projected influx in population.

Current sub-area plans for Central, North and South Kitsap are looking at the land capacity and how the existing UGA should be expanded — but the building industry doesn’t think the county is using the right numbers. For example, the commissioners chose to use the mid-range population projections while having the option to use high projections provided by the state. They have the option of using a less stringent formula for expanding the UGA.

“The commissioners and staff need to be listening to people who have seen the ups and downs in our community…instead of using numbers that aren’t going to work,” Brown says. “We’re putting scabs on old wounds.” He feels the sub-area plans will not mitigate escalating home prices.

County Community Development Director Cindy Baker disagrees with the assessment of a crisis, and says it’s too early to have a final answer to that. She says the plans are not a band-aid, as some builders have called them.

“The purpose of the sub area plans is to look holistically at the area and that hasn’t been done in the past,” she says. “They are not getting the numbers they had hoped for. It doesn’t mean they’re right or we’re right.”

Another problem with placing people in urban areas is that many don’t come to Kitsap to live in a city. “People come to Kitsap because they like rural lifestyle,” Palmer says. “The Growth Management Act says, in effect, ‘We don’t care what your reasons are for going into rural areas, we don’t want you there; we want you in the urban areas so we can afford to serve you with amenities.’”

On April 26, for example, there were only 20 new homes in Kitsap County, with about two months’ worth of inventory for all homes, according to Art Castle, Home Builders Association of Kitsap County (HBA) executive vice president.

“We’re getting to a point where people working in Kitsap County…will have to live (elsewhere) and commute here,” he says. “How will our kids be able to afford to live here?”

As workers have to look to Jefferson and Mason County for homes, they start commuting to Kitsap, clogging those same roads the GMA sought to free up by reducing sprawl. Angel believes the regulations may work fine in areas like Seattle, but not in Kitsap and many other counties, especially in Eastern Washington. “The effect …is devastating when you put a one-size fits all …on all counties,” she says.

Realtor Fred Depee with John L. Scott in Port Orchard says without loosening up the criteria for expanding the UGA, the housing market will continue to get worse. “Kitsap will become a very elitist community. It will be expensive to live here; it already has,” he adds.

Those concerns don’t even touch on the impact on businesses, which are finding it harder to expand and thrive. The question of the economy is on everyone’s minds as they discuss the housing market. As Kitsap workers migrate to other counties, they also take their dollars with them and spend them there.

And then, there are announcements like the one in May by the U.S. military, which proposes to add about 1,400 jobs to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton as part of nationwide base realignments. Some officials were quoted by the media as proclaiming good news for the local economy. But that could mean several hundred more people, not included in growth projections, all looking for a place to live.